Month: December 2015

1. Prime Minister Infinity – U.K. was released, the first Parliamentary game to use the Infinity game engine.

2. Prime Minister Infinity – Canada was released, and it now includes campaigns from 2015-2006.

3. A large number of updates were made to President Infinity, including expanding the Campaign Editor, 7 days per turn, added a main screen HUD for regional items creating, revamped the Turn Summary, created a new Election Night and export feature, many updates to the 2016 campaign (including adding many scripted events), and more.

4. The floodgates opened for user-designed campaigns, with more than 70 campaigns released. I am impressed by the campaign designers, and congratulate all of them!

5. Congress Infinity’s initial House 2016 and Senate 2012 campaigns were added, as well as several updates.

Thanks everyone for your feedback over the last year!

For the year ahead, the focus is simple. The first half of the year will be President Infinity, Congress Infinity, Prime Minister Infinity – U.K. and Canada.

The second half of the year will see continued focus on President Infinity and Congress Infinity, and the announcement of a new game, which will be the first non-election game from 270soft, but no more details yet.

Since it’s my job to model elections, and since Trump’s tactics have flummoxed most political experts, it’s obvious that the experts have things wrong. My guess is that Adams is correct that Trump is something like a ‘Master Persuader’.

The question for me is how to add this to the game. I’ve increased his Charisma to 4, and his Spin to 4. On the to-do list is increasing the affects of spinning and interviews in a campaign, since up to now that’s how Trump has operated. I’m also considering implementing a ‘contentious’ variable for speeches and so on, since Trump’s modus operandi seems to be to provoke by ‘speaking in headlines’, as someone put it.

I’m going to look carefully in the next few days at Adams’ analysis, and see if there are other elements I can apply to the game mechanics. What do you all think of his hypotheses?

Similarly, were there other writers who have had a similar track record in predicting what was going to happen in this campaign?

(On a side-note, I am amazed at how little people care about political pundits’ track records. Most get things wrong again and again, yet many people keep listening to their predictions and giving them weight.)

How to handle hypothetical candidates’s %s? For example, if a player were to decide to save the Republican party from itself (or so the thought might go) by deploying Mitt Romney for a Jan. 1st, 2016 start, there’s little polling data to say what he should start at.

My intuition is to have him start at 0%, and the same for similar hypotheticals.

The polling feature now works in conjunction with the Select Campaign Screen. Here is the July 1st, 2015 start for Republicans.

The starting %s were automatically calculated based on national poll data for the campaign, and the candidates were then sorted based on the %s. You can see that Bush is clinging to a one-point lead at this point.

Here’s Oct. 1st, 2015.

This was near the top of Fiorina’s ascent. You can see Bush is no longer in the top 4, and Carson is in second place.

Again, the %s and ranking of the candidates were all done automatically. The manual ordering of candidates now only matters for the general election, or where there’s no polling data that has been inputted.

I am at work on a new feature for President Infinity – the Polls Editor. This is part of the Campaign Editor.

Here, I am entering info for a Dec. ABC-Washington Post poll for the Republican primaries, which has (among other things) Donald Trump at 38% and Ted Cruz at 15%.

This feature has two main aims.

1. It will allow for starting %s in a game to change based on the start date. Currently, there are only primaries or general election %s.

2. It will make it much easier for a campaign designer to figure out starting %s for a given date. Just enter the polling data you have available for around that date. The computer will fill in any of the blanks automatically, using region issue similarities to find the best fits. No more guessing what Bobby Jindal’s %s are in North Dakota.

You can see that you can enter both general election polls and primaries polls. For the general election, you can also enter generic numbers (‘Republican’, ‘Democratic’) or leader-specific %s for polls that looked at hypothetical or real match-ups (this will become more important when Favorability is implemented – that is set to be implemented next).

You can also see that there are specific organizations associated with a poll – for now, that’s just to help keep track of which poll is which. In the future, this might be expanded to allow for tendencies towards over- or under-sampling by various organizations which lead to skewed results.

Finally, there is a margin of error box for each poll (set to 6 in the above screen shot). The computer uses this when figuring out starting %s, especially when there’s a difference between polling numbers that are relatively close in time.